Tag Archives: shocking

It’s not as shit as lots of critics are saying it is. But it is mostly shit.

If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Right? That’s a solid rule of life, tried and tested and formed from extensive experience. We trust such wise old mottos for a reason. They must work.

Well they work to an extent. This sequel takes the rule to the extreme. It takes it much too far. As many have already said, Part 2 is pretty much a scene by scene remake of the original. If you’ve seen The Hangover this will be predictable. The jokes might initially force a smile, a smile of recollection, a hint of the laughter from your first viewing of Part 1. Then they will become torturously tiresome.

Most of the attempts at humour in the film left me absolutely cold. I watched, aware that this was meant to be funny, conscious of idiotic laughter elsewhere in the cinema, feeling completely uninterested. The times that you are tempted to the verge of a giggle feel as if they are due to an uncontrollable infectious reaction, a mindless physical spasm, spreading from a gaffawing buffoon or someone who hasn’t seen The Hangover. Or someone who laughs at the first syllable of country.

Actually on a few occassions, no more than three, I felt compelled to genuinely laugh. For whatever reason, be it my easily shocked innocence or taste for inappropriate jokes, I wanted to let myself chuckle. BUT so appalled was I by the lack of creativity, the sheer cheek of the filmmakers to release a sequel with EXACTLY the same format and plot, I forced myself to conceal my pleasure. Or limit it to the slightest “ha”. Quite apart from the fact I knew in my head it was awful, there were also some gags that strayed over my (usually rather wide) line of decency on issues from sexuality to race.

There are a handful of enjoyable things in Part 2 however. Chief among them is the wife-in-waiting, played by Jamie Chung. She is delightfully pretty and sexy, and not in the crude way you might expect from these films. Her character is not spectacuarly rounded, lifelike or convincing, but simply the stereotypically perfect girlfriend/partner/wife. She is gorgeous, intelligent, caring, understanding, perhaps even submissive. It’s briefly nice to indulge the impossible daydream of having such a devoted soul mate.

Bangkok is pretty much the perfect location for this film. But I’m not going to indulge it any further by picking out the positives. It is mostly irritating. When I saw Holy Rollers, I realised Justin Bartha could act and play interesting characters. Here he goes back to his career of missing out on crazy happenings, this time not on a roof but by a turquoise resort pool, fretting over five star breakfast. Seriously couldn’t they have shuffled the Wolf pack to include him this time? Just shake things up with a little change?

A handful of reviews have speculated that this sequel must surely be a piece of high concept art, mirroring the actual weary effects of a hangover. The first film was the wild night out and this is the comedown. These 102 minutes of my life aren’t refunded with such creative criticism though.

This has turned into a pointless rant. All I meant to say is that the critics are 90% right about The Hangover: Part 2. And the 10% they’re wrong about is not worth your time or money.

This is one of those films with a Ronseal title. There are lots of zombies and zombies are dead, but also sort of lively in a sleepwalking sort of way, hence the “un”. The marketing material continues the no nonsense approach, showcasing a tag line of “RUN.HIDE.DIE!”. Tellingly a footnote informs me that “this disc contains no extra features”. I say tellingly because you really don’t get anything more than a bunch of shirts smothered in red paint and lips sticky with jam.

Sarah has survived a “massive explosion”. She is rather distraught though that the blast has peppered her Dad with all manner of fatal wounds, from bites to paper cuts. Desperately she tries to stop him from bleeding to death in the back of paramedic Steve’s small car, ideal for students or the elderly. Steve tries to calm Sarah as they drive away from the city to an “evacuation centre”. When they get there, Sarah passes out after the doctor plunges a needle full of adrenalin into poor old Dad from a great height.

Sarah comes round to find no one about, apart from a wheelchair parked shoddily and at a skewed angle in the middle of a typical hospital corridor. Perfectly logically she starts to warily shout “hello” at no one in particular. Finally some bloke turns up, tottering towards her, but Sarah can’t quite make him out because of some lingering concussion and a random cut that’s appeared on her forehead halfway through the scene. Her vision clears up just as he’s right in front of her. Unfortunately for Sarah this fella is in a right state; he hasn’t moisturized for weeks and he’s horny as hell.

Thankfully the first of a few fat men in Zombie Undead picks precisely this moment to turn up with a randomly acquired blade (other conveniently placed objects will star later such as torches and a bottle of pills). He swiftly slices the sex pest’s skull like a melon. Then Sarah’s female failings kick in. Instead of showering her rescuer with gratitude she wails and whines, inching herself away from our chubby chopper. It takes him ages to explain that there are a load of “things” like the sex pest, with awful skin and serious body odour issues, staggering about the corridors leaking goo and munching flesh. Sarah slowly accepts the situation, a bit, and vows to help Jay (for that is our hero’s name) find his little brother if he helps her find her Dad.

Sadly for Jay Sarah never quite embraces the survival instinct, always trying to save the zombies and people they encounter when they are beyond redemption. What are women like hey? Jay also isn’t helped by fellow porker Steve, who was the paramedic with the little car from earlier. Weirdly he is the slowest to come to terms with the blood billowing monsters. They find him cowering in a toilet cubicle, in an awfully amateurish immensely suspenseful scene with Jay crashing open the doors one by one, and despite his medical training he’s prone to chucking his guts up at the sight of other’s guts.

There are an awful lot of innards on show. If our fat protagonists could man up a little and acquire a taste for it there are feasts to be had, indeed zombies are regularly shown gobbling up intestines with grunting delight. One scene in yet another toilet (either funds were tight or the director loved the aesthetics of Condom machines and urinals) has what looks like a shrine to Lidl’s chipolatas, drizzled in organically sourced tomato ketchup and served on a bed of recently devoured homo sapien.

Even the gore lacks any variation or quality, despite unhealthy splutterings of it. The direction and editing is clunky, predictable and poor, but its imitation of handheld horror is competent compared to the script. The dialogue essentially has two levels, sounding either like cliché regurgitations of previous films or as if the shockingly bad and evidently inexperienced actors are improvising in a beginner’s drama class. As for the plotting a half hearted attempt is made to make things modern, with vague and contradictory allusions to a biological terrorist attack. It was obviously decided that to leave everything unexplained would be classier, thus depriving the audience of any satisfaction whatsoever from Zombie Undead’s 86 minutes.

Some answers surface from the pools of irritating disappointment as soon as the credits roll however. Why the unusual and implausible fat hero, with the weird undertaker/security guard costume? The film’s writer, Kris Tearse, was also its male star. The primary location was Leicester’s De Montfort University, which explains the extremely low budget feel. So a bunch of students are living the dream with this film it seems, no matter what its failings, some will be ecstatically excited when the DVD is released on the 30thof May. It has nothing new or engaging at all to recommend it. But to help justify the dream I will admit I flinched like a child at one point, and was genuinely surprised, although after the zombies had gone.

Some people are perfectionists. You cannot imagine them any other way. They strive again and again to be the best, to fulfil their wildest, finely crafted, unblemished dreams. We all know people that work themselves into an unfathomable, illogical frenzy about the slightest flaw. You worry about what will happen to them if they ever completely lose perspective and fall through the cracks of their own expectations. How far can they push themselves, what lengths will they go to in the quest for perfection? Will you lose the person you know as they struggle towards faultlessly achieving their goals?

Black Swan is a film about the extremes of the perfectionist and the mania that can ensue in the dizzy rush for excellence in art. It’s packed full of themes about creativity and control, trust and tantrums. Is talent about honing your skills again and again until they’re technically sound, or something more intangible you must simply give into, like desire? Can anyone ascend to stardom and maintain their youthful innocence? Just how destructive can all consuming ambition be? Most of all, whatever questions Black Swan raises, it is a piece of beautifully pure, utterly gripping drama.

Drama as powerful and captivating as this is rarely found at the cinema these days. Perhaps because of the influence of and sizeable chunks of Swan Lake used in the film, Black Swan has the sensual quality of a stage production. Frequently it is flinchingly shocking. Acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky ratchets up the tension and paranoia to chilling, unsettling but completely compelling levels. The whole thing is a visual feast. Most surprisingly of all, given the sheer number of scares jostling for position and all the hype around the film, there were more than a handful of moments in which the auditorium was plagued by infectious giggles.

Most of these laughs come via Vincent Cassel’s Thomas Leroy, director of the New York ballet company. He is amusingly frank with Natalie Portman’s Nina, as is Mila Kunis as Nina’s dancing rival Lily. Both of these supporting cast members give excellent performances but it’s Portman’s Oscar worthy turn rightly stealing the headlines. In the past I’ve found her acting irritating, especially her regular appearances as an English rose type figure, with stereotypical accent. She was the only thing I mildly disliked about V for Vendetta. But here Portman’s character is meant to be prissy and annoying, and despite this as her delusions worsen and multiply you find yourself rooting for her to overcome her demons. Her portrayal of mental confusion and paranoia spiralling into madness is startling.

Barbara Hershey plays Nina’s controlling mother, who has projected her disappointments from her own curtailed career onto her daughter. In a sickly sweet, cotton ball world at home Nina lives as a little girl, primed only to succeed as a dancer. This suffocating environment is far from helpful as Nina works to try and embrace the role of evil, seductive Black Swan as well as the pure, fragile and perfect White Swan Queen. Her director continually tells her to loosen up and the suffocation from Nina’s home life spread throughout the film, haunting her and the audience. Nina projects her own anxieties onto the confident, relaxed Lily, who soon becomes a recurring, taunting theme in her fantasies.

At the beginning of the film, Cassel’s director tells his dancers his will be a “visceral” reworking of Swan Lake. And Black Swan is certainly visceral. Of course it touches on all the themes I mentioned earlier, but in reality it’s far too over the top to explore them properly. Above all else it is a fantastical and theatrical story. You’ll be gripped by the drama, haunted and confused by the plot. Sucked in by claustrophobic visuals, charmed by stunning dance sequences and engaged by superb acting; Black Swan has a bit of everything and its vividness is inexplicable. You won’t see anything more sensual this year.